Live from Chicago! It’s LinkedIn’s new data center!

LinkedIn has grown by leaps and bounds this past year and currently we are adding professionals to our site at the rate of one user per second.

Behind the scenes, there are several dedicated teams of highly skilled people with (an unusually high tolerance for sleep deprivation), and a varied array of skills in areas such as capacity planning, network and server architecture, and web technology, and these teams are collectively known as the Linkedin Operations organization. All of these skills are continually focused on ensuring that the combination of hardware, software and data stored in our Data Center follows just the right ‘playbook’ to ensure that we offer you, a world class user experience. The primary goal for the LinkedIn Operations organization is for our site and partner applications to be available 24/7.

I am sure that LinkedIn’s operations team from our earlier days look back fondly on the time when our production infrastructure only needed to support the ‘tiny’ number of 2 million or even a paltry 5 million users. Fast forward to 2008, and with over 32 million users and a fast growing product portfolio, imagine the volume of hardware, software and data involved. It was time to expand our Data Center footprint so we can continue to offer our millions of users, a rock-solid and reliable service.

During a multi-month planning effort involving a large and cross functional team, plans were drawn up, revised, and re-revised. Project team members, in addition to their existing responsibilities, rose up to the challenge of architecting and implementing a world class physical infrastructure, on which we could deploy our applications and data. On December 6, 2008 that work culminated in LinkedIn’s latest addition to our portfolio of Data Centers going live to serve our customers’ Internet traffic, and because of that we are now better positioned than ever for the tremendous growth that lies ahead in the New Year!